Portable devices, such as smart phones or tablets, are able to send and receive messages. For example the portable device may send and receive e-mail messages, short message service (SMS) text messages, and social networking messages, such as messages from Twitter™, Facebook™, LinkedIn™ or other social networks. Further the messages may include other types of information such as calendar appointments. The messages may be stored in one or more message stores on the device, or in one or more message stores on a remote server or device.
The messages in the message stores associated with the device may be searched using different search criteria, such as a name of a sender or recipient. Although the messages sent and received from the portable device may be of different types, the search functionality may provide a unified search to search all of the different message types. Typically each message, regardless of its type, will have a sender, recipient and a body, although other fields are possible. It is possible to include other types of information in the message store that can be searched. Typically, when searching the message store, a user inputs the information to search for in specific fields, so for example a user may input “Paul” in a From field. The search functionality will then search for all messages whose From field at least partially matches “Paul”. A list of the messages resulting from the search may then be displayed to the user.
Although the search functionality provides adequate searching of messages, it can be difficult to specify the desired search criteria, especially on a portable device with limited display space. With the limited display space, it is undesirable to display input fields for all possible fields, which may not be used. Further, with the use of touch sensitive displays becoming more common, the need to switch between different input fields in order to input the various search criteria may be inconvenient for the user.
It would be desirable to have an alternative and/or improved method for searching message stores on a portable device, and in particular on portable devices having limited display space and/or a touch sensitive display.